Over the last year or so, I've built up a collection of video files that have been captured off DVB-T television using an Elgato EyeTV.  Some of these files were in the original capture format (.eyetv) and a few others I'd written out as DVD's.

I wanted to watch some of them on the iPod Touch and proceeded to use the export facility in EyeTV2....

First problem was: which format to choose?

Since the Touch is an iPod I tried the 'iPod(best)' export template and after several hours on my G4 laptop the export produced a .m4v video file, which would import into iTunes and would sync to the Touch.

I also thought that with the iPod Touch looking like an iPhone that the 'iPhone' export template would also work, so I gave it a go and after several more hours there was a similar .m4v file on the laptop Desktop. This file was a lot smaller than the one produced by the previous 'iPod(best)' template. This smaller file would import to iTunes but wouldn't sync with the Touch. (There has since been a QuickTime update and these files will now sync with the Touch)

For video files that I'd exported before all this that I didn't have the .eyetv file for posed another problem.

EyeTV2 wouldn't read these exported files in so that program couldn't be used to handle the conversion, so I looked elsewhere.

Mac users on the whole aren't very fond of anything that requires a commandline to start it, so almost every conversion program has a GUI (graphic user interface) with lots of menu's; sliders; widgets etc. Some of these GUI programs are just a fancy wrapper around a commandline utility but you get charged for the use of the GUI even when the commandline utility is a free download.

A few of these GUI wrappers use ffmpeg and I've played around with ffmpeg on other systems. After a bit of digging around on the Net I've managed to work out a reasonable set of options to ffmpeg to produce video files from almost any format that will import to iTunes and more importantly will sync to the iPod Touch.

Using ffmpeg has also meant that I could make use of other platforms to do the conversion, like the dual processor Linux system on my desk at work.